The Michigan Supreme Court has reversed a state appeals court decision, issuing a ruling Wednesday that a single photo identification of a man suspected of robbing and shooting another man at gunpoint in Detroit wasn't sufficient.........

Quote:

........The case involved Elisah Thomas, 20, who was charged in a 2014 robbery and shooting on the city's west side. Thomas has denied being involved in the incident, and told the Free Press after last week's oral arguments were held that the decision to leave his home that night, "changed my life."

The key issue in the case: Whether the identification of Thomas raises due process concerns. After the victim, Dwight Dukes, was robbed and shot, police officers canvassed the area looking for a suspect. They came across Thomas, who said he had left his home to get a meal from a nearby coney island restaurant.

The police officer took his picture with a cell phone. Within a hour of the shooting, the officer was showing the single cell photo to the victim as he was being wheeled down a hospital hallway, asking him "Was this the guy who shot you?"

Lawyers for Thomas argued that the process was unnecessarily suggestive. A Wayne County Circuit judge agreed, throwing out the identification and dismissing the charges. But the Michigan Court of Appeals reversed the circuit judge.

"Due process concerns arise when law enforcement officers use an identification procedure that is both suggestive and unnecessary," the court said in a written ruling.

"The parties do not dispute the facts relating to the identification: the victim viewed the assailant’s partially obscured face for no more than seven seconds on a dark city street with no streetlights while a gun was pointed at him. The description the victim gave to police officers was generic and could have described many young men in the area; moreover the victim’s description of the assailant changed between his first interview and his follow-up interview at the hospital.

"Accordingly, the trial court determined that the single photograph identification was sufficiently unreliable and that it should be suppressed. We agree with the trial court’s assessment of reliability based on the relevant totality of the circumstances.......

when this story came across the news there was precious little said except the usual villainous broad statements, and a picture of 2 police cars crashed into the womans car in the shape of a v. was reported as a traffic stop though it originated inside a mall. the reason security went after her has not been told nor has any video or other proof of the accusations against the woman.

A former Michigan State Police trooper is facing a murder charge in the death of a 15-year-old boy whose ATV crashed after he was shot with a Taser while fleeing from police.

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said the actions of former Trooper Mark Bessner caused Damon Grimes to crash into a parked truck in Detroit on Aug. 26.

“Trooper Bessner unnecessarily deployed his Taser at Mr. Grimes without legal justification or excuse as Mr. Grimes was traveling at least 35 to 40 miles per hour,” she said.

Worthy said Bessner, 43, who resigned shortly after the incident, is charged with one count of second-degree murder and two counts of involuntary manslaughter. Second-degree murder carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment............

Michigan’s Secretary of State is seeking an emergency stay of a federal judge’s ruling that the agency can no longer suspend driver licenses for nonpayment of traffic fines.

U.S. District Judge Linda Parker on Dec. 14 issued a preliminary injunction blocking the state from suspending driver licenses for those who can't afford to pay off court debts. She denied the state's request for a stay of that ruling on Friday.

But in an emergency motion filed Friday with the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, lawyers from the Attorney General's Office accused Parker of "over-reaching" and said her order is overly vague and will create "monumental" problems for the Michigan Secretary of State's Office

Parker issued the injunction in a lawsuit brought by a group called Equal Justice Under Law.

Parker said the law providing for license suspensions for unpaid fines likely violates constitutional due process requirements..............

WASHINGTON (CNN) - The Justice Department on Thursday rescinded a tranche of agency-issued "guidance documents" that explained and interpreted policy across a range of issues, including a 2016 memo that cautioned courts against the burdensome enforcement of fines for criminal offenders.

The document crunch comes as Attorney General Jeff Sessions has spent the better part of a year reversing Obama-era policies and legal interpretations, aligning the Trump Justice Department with administration priorities of deregulation and a "return to the rule of law."..........

Well, I hope you had a great Christmas, or Hanukkah, or that the wind was with you when you burned that sacrifice to Baal.

But there are thousands and thousands of Michigan citizens whose holidays may not have been as grand. Their lives were horribly damaged, even ruined, by our accountant governor's spreadsheet philosophy of treating human beings like widgets.

Incredibly, few still know much about the more than 37,000 people falsely accused of unemployment insurance fraud by the state — people who often lost their homes, went through bankruptcies, lost marriages and education, and suffered horrible distress.

"I think it hasn't gotten the attention it deserves because it is a very complicated issue," Jennifer Lord tells me. She's an employment law attorney with Pitt McGehee in Royal Oak, and has worked thousands of hours representing the victims — so far, without getting paid. "Flint was easier for the public to understand," she says.

Everybody knows what happened in Flint, of course; to Snyder's emergency managers, water from the Flint River was good enough for those poor black folks who had lost the right to govern themselves anyhow, and besides, it saved the state a little money to disconnect from Detroit. They saved a little more by not putting anti-corrosion chemicals in the water.

But not in the long run, as we now know. The lead poisoning scandal that followed could cost taxpayers billions, and has helped make Michigan's wretched government famous worldwide; I was asked about it by a tour guide at the ruins of Pompeii last spring.

But far fewer know about the human tragedy caused by our unemployment insurance disaster. Flashback four years, when Michigan's Unemployment Insurance Agency proudly unveiled its new $47 million "MiDAS" computer — the Michigan Integrated Data Automated System. From now on, they said, it would take over and track down any cases of fraud.

Buying the computer enabled the Snyder administration to lay off about 400 full and part-time agents statewide who used to check applications for fraud and other discrepancies. MiDAS would be better! Cheaper! Faster and more efficient! Bye-bye, human error!................

.......Simon's contract has a number of details about what she gets if she resigns. She can choose to return to the faculty, at which point she will get a 12-month research leave at her current salary of $750,000. She then gets her current salary for the next year and 75% of her salary for the next two years. She also gets office space and secretarial support. She also gets the title of "president emeritus."

Past presidents at the University of Michigan, including Mary Sue Coleman and James Duderstadt, have had office space after they stepped down. Coleman, who is the president of the Association of American Universities, still has a small office on campus. Duderstadt has a salary and an office because he is now a faculty member.

But Simon's contract is unique.

"In the 200+ presidential contracts we’ve reviewed, this is the only contract that provides for the president to receive 100% of their last presidential base salary for the first year that they return to the faculty," James Finkelstein, a professor emeritus at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and the leading researcher of presidential pay, told the Free Press in an e-mail.

He reviewed Simon's contract at the Free Press's request.

"This means that Dr. Simon will be paid at least $750,000 for her first year returning to the faculty from her research leave. After that, she will be paid 75% of that base salary, or at least $562,500 per year. Dr. Simon’s field is higher education. She received her PhD in education from MSU in 1974.

"So based on this contract, it would appear that Dr. Simon will be paid more than twice the amount of the most highly paid faculty member in the College of Education. In addition, she will be paid more than the most highly paid faculty member in the entire university, C. Konrad Gelbke who makes $433,441. He is one of the world’s leading physicists.".......

........"At every level, the leadership of the city of Wichita failed," Andrew Stroth, an attorney for Finch's mother, said Tuesday.

"This is not about money. This is about reforming the Wichita Police Department and the Wichita leadership taking accountability of a police department that has a history of excessive force."..........

A Detroit suburb agreed to a $1.25 million settlement in a lawsuit filed by the family of a woman who was fatally shot by police near a shopping mall, according to a document released Thursday.

A Dearborn officer repeatedly shot Janet Wilson while she was in her car on Michigan Avenue, a busy street, in 2016. Police were pursuing the 31-year-old after a dispute was reported nearby at Fairlane Mall.

A judge approved a settlement between Dearborn and Wilson's family on Jan. 10. But U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman honored the parties' request to keep the details confidential. The deal was released under a public records request by The Associated Press.

No criminal charges were filed against police. Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy said Wilson "exhibited erratic and aggressive behavior" at the mall and drove her car toward the officer. A state police spokesman, Lt. Mike Shaw, said Wilson was "armed with a 3-ton vehicle.".............

Fifty years ago next month, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., at what turned out to be his last Sunday sermon. He talked about the perils and promises of a “triple revolution,” as he called it, consisting of automation, the emergence of nuclear weaponry, and the global fight for human rights. Regarding that first prong, he noted at the time, “Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood.”

It’s this speech that Virginia Eubanks, an associate professor of political science at the University at Albany, SUNY, comes back to at the end of her new book Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. In it, Eubanks studies some of the seemingly neutral—and even well-meaning—technologies that promise to streamline the U.S. welfare apparatus. Automated systems that gauge eligibility for Medicaid and food stamps, databases that match homeless people to resources, and statistical tools that detect cases of child abuse all hold the potential to revolutionize welfare programs. Eubanks examines these technologies, detailing the ways they can sometimes compromise the rights of the very people they supposedly help.

I recently spoke with Eubanks to about some of the main themes in her book. The conversation that follows has been edited for length and clarity.

Tanvi Misra: In your book, you lay out the troublesome history of poverty-management systems: from hellish “poorhouses” to the scientific charity movement, the New Deal welfare apparatus to the automation of welfare. What is the common thread?

Virginia Eubanks: Often when we talk about new technologies, we talk about them as “disruptors”—things that shake up the system that we're in right now. One of my big arguments in the book is that the tools that I’m talking about are more evolution than revolution. So that history really, really matters.

Why I start the book with a brick-and-mortar poorhouse is because it was the most innovative poverty-regulation system of its time, in the 1800s. It rose out of a huge economic catastrophe—the 1819 depression—and the social movements organized by folks to protect themselves and their families. What’s really important about the poorhouse—and this is the thread that goes throughout all of the things I talk about in the book—is that it was based on this distinction between what at the time were called the “impotent” and the “able” poor. The “impotent” poor were folks who, by reason of physical disability or age or infirmity, just couldn't work. The “able” poor were those folks who moral regulators at the time believed were probably able to work, but might just be shirking..............

That's what crossing the border into the state of New Mexico was like in the 60's and 70's. I've heard they've improved the situation since then, but I haven't experienced it with the seat of my pants.

In the fall of 2008, Omega Young got a letter prompting her to recertify for Medicaid.

But she was unable to make the appointment because she was suffering from ovarian cancer. She called her local Indiana office to say she was in the hospital.

Her benefits were cut off anyway. The reason: "failure to cooperate."

"She lost her benefits, she couldn't afford her medication, she lost her food stamps, she couldn't pay her rent, she lost access to free transportation to her medical appointments," Virginia Eubanks tells NPR's Ari Shapiro. Eubanks is the author of a new book, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor.

"Young died on March 1, 2009," Eubanks says. "The next day, she won an appeal for wrongful termination and all of her benefits were restored the day after her death."..............

Yeah, as I've said before, there is a problem to relying on algorithms and AIs. Aside from the unemployment/automation issue (human decision makers losing their job).

We always seem to have this weird trust of algorithms. An AI can't have human prejudices, biases, emotions, or irrationalities. So it must do a better job, right?

Well, algorithms must still be written by human programmers. Most complex programs are written by teams of programmers, and reflect their biases, and may contain their mistakes, or perhaps fail to take into account what they should have.

Until algorithms are not made by people (and BTW there has been some success at getting software to write & rewrite itself, some effort at machine learning, but it's still a work in progress), they too will be flawed.

We can't always see where our programming will lead our constructs, but to me it's another outcome of the law of unintended consequences.

.........Across the district, 14 out of the district's 115 schools have oversize classes — many of them with multiple classes that are too large. According to fall class data provided by the district:

Nearly every K-8 class at Palmer Park is teeming with students. A third-grade class has 40 students, a sixth-grade class has 44 and a second-grade class has 39. The school's overall numbers have increased even more since fall.An eighth-grade class at Noble Elementary-Middle School has 52 students.A third-grade class at Bow Elementary-Middle School has 48 students. An eighth-grade class has 47 students.A fourth-grade class at Dixon Elementary-Middle School has 49 students, while a fifth-grade class has 43 students.A fourth-grade class at Mason Elementary has 45 students.Meanwhile, a sweeping report on school funding in Michigan that was released last month suggested 20 as the optimal class size for children in grades K-3.

There are now 178 vacancies in the Detroit school district, down from 260 at this time last year. But it's still enough to cause problems.....................

plenty of money to give away to big business and billionaires like the scheme that has people paying state taxes to billionaire dan gilbert. but to do it you have to trade away what would be the security of having safe roads to travel on

If you've ever driven across the Michigan-Ohio border - you know the obvious change in pavement quality.

In case you're wondering - it has nothing to do with the Toledo War of the mid-1800s.

Ohio always seems to have better road conditions despite the fact that Ohio faces many of the same weather issues we do.

The freeze-thaw cycle that spawns potholes in Michigan - which are particularly bad this year - should cause as much damage in surrounding areas, but it doesn't.

Michigan has a higher truck weight limit than Ohio, as well.

Here's MDOT's explanation as to why Ohio's roads are better:This one’s not really a myth - Ohio does have better roads. The myth has more to do with why Ohio’s roads are better. It’s not a lack of know-how, it’s a lack of investment..............

plenty of money to give away to big business and billionaires like the scheme that has people paying state taxes to billionaire dan gilbert. but to do it you have to trade away what would be the security of having safe roads to travel on

Um, the author should visit first ring suburbs like the one in which I grew up. Southeast of Cleveland it’s roads are atrocious because it has no money. Development, something never discussed as to process and who wields the levers of power, has left my hometown a hollow shell of itself.

_________________bird's theorem-"we the people" are stupid.

"No one is so foolish as to choose war over peace. In peace sons bury their fathers, in war fathers bury their sons." - Herodotus

Um, the author should visit first ring suburbs like the one in which I grew up. Southeast of Cleveland it’s roads are atrocious because it has no money. Development, something never discussed as to process and who wields the levers of power, has left my hometown a hollow shell of itself.

in Michigan thats everywhere though, the decline started in 2001 where we literally saw the roads crumble to heaps of rubble and just remained thereafter. we've seen some improvements after the bush era but worsened again with snyder.

in Michigan thats everywhere though, the decline started in 2001 where we literally saw the roads crumble to heaps of rubble and just remained thereafter. we've seen some improvements after the bush era but worsened again with snyder.

I don’t doubt that they are bad. I just don’t think Ohio is in great shape.

_________________bird's theorem-"we the people" are stupid.

"No one is so foolish as to choose war over peace. In peace sons bury their fathers, in war fathers bury their sons." - Herodotus

A Detroit police commander has been suspended after he allegedly left a man severely injured after an altercation at a Corktown restaurant, according to WXYZ-TV.

Cmdr. Timothy Leach, who was working as a security guard at the Ottava Via restaurant on Michigan Avenue during the St. Patrick's Day Parade and Corktown Races on March 11, is accused of injuring Michael Karpovich, 41 of Washington Township, when he allegedly tossed him out for being unruly, the station reported.

Karpovich is being represented by Jennifer Damico of the Mike Morse Law Firm, who confirmed he is in the hospital, unresponsive and on a ventilator with multiple skull fractures and a bilateral brain contusion.

They also had to remove part of his skull to relieve come cranial pressure, and it is unknown how long he will be in the hospital because "his prognosis is very poor," she said.

Damico said she's been informed that the Detroit Police Department has surveillance video from the restaurant and cellphone video from witnesses and the investigation is ongoing.

However, she said it is uncertain if Leach was working security at the restaurant as part of the city's Secondary Employment in Uniform Program or if he was moonlighting.........

........Family members called around to hospitals after Karpovich didn't come home and located him at Detroit Receiving on Monday evening. Damico said the family then tried to make a police report, but the department refused to take it. .......

as business owner you have access to the resources and all the powers of the police to be used at your disposal in your business but as a patron you have them used against you.

The sheriff of a county profiled by the Guardian after it was found to have the highest rate of killings by police in the US once said it is “better financially” for local authorities if officers kill suspects rather than badly injure them.

Sheriff Donny Youngblood of Kern county, California, who is currently running for re-election, made the remarks while addressing rank-and-file officers during his first campaign in 2006. Video of the meeting was recently found by an officers’ union.

“You know what happens when a guy makes a bad shooting on somebody and kills them? Three million bucks and the family goes away after a long back and forth,” Youngblood said.

He went on to say: “Which way do you think is better financially – to cripple them or kill them – for the county?” An unidentified man offscreen said “kill them”, to which Youngblood replied: “Absolutely. Because if they’re crippled we get to take care of them for life. And that cost goes way up.”

The sheriff’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kern county was the subject of a Guardian series after 13 people were killed there by law enforcement officers during 2015. During the same period, nine people were killed by the NYPD in all of New York City, which had almost 10 times as many residents and about 23 times as many law enforcement officers.

The series prompted inquiries by California’s attorney general and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which are ongoing. The number of killings by police in the county subsequently fell sharply. The Guardian found five people were killed there in 2016. The Mapping Police Violence project found six deaths in 2017...............

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